Weather dogs Pakistan avalanche search

2012-04-11 17:41

Islamabad - Harsh weather conditions hampering the search for 138 people buried under a huge avalanche at a Pakistani army camp will last at least another 24 hours, a senior meteorological official said on Wednesday.

A huge wall of snow crashed into the remote Siachen Glacier base high in the mountains in disputed Kashmir early on Saturday morning, smothering an area of one square kilometre.

450 rescuers

As more than 450 rescuers worked in sub-zero temperatures, experts said there was little chance of finding any survivors at the site, which is at an altitude of around 4 000m.

The site of the Gayari camp has been hit by heavy snow in recent days and Arif Mahmood, the head of the Pakistan Meteorological Department said the bad weather was likely to last another day.

"The harsh weather conditions in Gayari will begin to improve from midday Thursday", Mahmood told AFP in Islamabad.

"However, it will remain overcast today with thunderstorms and snowfall in Gayari and its surrounding areas."

Flight operations hampered

Rescuers have been using mechanical diggers and shovels to dig through the vast expanse of snow, rock and ice dumped by the avalanche, but efforts to fly in more heavy equipment have been hindered by the weather.

Mahmood said flight operations to Gilgit and Skardu - the two nearest towns - should be able to resume late on Thursday or early on Friday.

Another weather official, who was supervising weather forecasts for the area, told AFP that the temperature at Gayari would be around -8 to 10 degrees Celsius.

Photographs released by the military on Tuesday showed diggers and rescuers at work on an almost featureless expanse of dirty grey snow and ice, with no trace visible of the camp that had been the 6th Northern Light Infantry headquarters.

The site is surrounded by some of the world's highest peaks and lies near the de facto border with India in the militarised region of Kashmir, which has caused two of the three wars between the two countries since independence in 1947.

The nuclear-armed rivals fought over Siachen in 1987, but guns on the glacier have largely fallen silent since a slow-moving peace process was launched in 2004.